Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  ‘Do you use incense in your house?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, I picked up on it from fans who used to send me joss sticks … I quite like the smell of them.’

  ‘Is there anything sinister in that?’ Havers asked. ‘Is it done to conceal the smell of cannabis?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Keith said firmly.

  He was then shown the briar pipe which police analysis had proved to contain traces of cannabis resin. ‘That came from Los Angeles,’ he said. ‘It was given to me.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘An American – a group’s road manager.’

  ‘On a trip like that, you could get a lot of stuff … a mountain of stuff,’ Havers suggested.

  ‘Yeah – always. When I get back to England, my suitcases are full up with rubbish.’

  ‘Did you have any idea that anyone at your house was smoking cannabis that weekend?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Would you have allowed such a thing to happen?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  To counteract the manifestly good impression Keith had made so far, Malcolm Morris began his cross-examination with a well-tried device of British barristers when pitted against their social inferiors – the ‘let me see if I’ve got this right’ or ‘let us establish if you are wholly or just partially cretinous’ approach.

  ‘You heard the opening address to this court by your counsel, did you not?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘It was given on your instructions?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘He [your counsel] spoke of various things and in the course of that opening speech made it quite clear that your defence was that Snyderman had been planted in your weekend party as part of a wicked conspiracy by the News of the World. Is that part of your defence or not?’

  ‘Yes it is, sir,’ Keith replied.

  ‘Is your defence that Snyderman was planted by the News of the World in an attempt to get Mick Jagger convicted of smoking hashish? Is that the suggestion?’

  ‘That is the suggestion,’ Keith agreed.

  ‘… so, if you are seriously suggesting that this was part of a plot, it is a curious plot in that nothing, in fact, was done to associate Jagger with Indian hemp.’

  ‘He was associated with the whole raid, which is enough, I’m sure,’ Keith answered.

  ‘Is this what you are saying – and the jury will want to know – that, because the News of the World did not want to pay libel damages to Mick Jagger, it was arranged to have Indian hemp planted in your house?’

  ‘Yes,’ Keith said.

  ‘There was, as we know,’ Malcolm Morris proceeded, ‘a young woman sitting on a settee, wearing only a fur rug. Would you agree that, in the ordinary course of events, you would expect a young woman to be embarrassed if she had nothing on but a fur rug in the presence of eight men, two of whom were hangers-on and another a Moroccan servant?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Keith replied.

  ‘You regard that, do you, as quite normal?’

  Here, finally, Keith let show a flicker of his contempt for the proceedings.

  ‘We are not old men,’ was his retort. ‘We’re not worried about petty morals.’

  * * *

  Judge Block’s summing up, after the lunch recess, began with an irritated reference to the view, expressed four weeks earlier by Dick Taverne MP, that unrestricted reporting of Jagger and Richard’s committal proceedings might have created prejudice in the jury’s minds. ‘That gentleman,’ Judge Block observed, ‘did not know the quality of a Sussex jury such as you are here now.’ Since the quality of a Sussex jury is in general no different from that of a Surrey or Hampshire jury it can only be concluded that the judge was buttering up the jury, as judges very often do, to make it more receptive to his own view of the evidence. The peroration that followed contained several strong indications that Judge Block, in court usher phraseology, was ‘summing up for a conviction’.

  That much was clear enough in his direction to the jury to ‘put out of your minds [i.e. do not in any circumstances overlook] any prejudice you may feel about the way Richard dresses, or his observations about petty morals … The issue you have to try is a comparatively simple one. You have to be satisfied that cannabis resin was being smoked in the house when the police went there, and you have to be satisfied that Richard knew of it.

  ‘… You must exclude from your mind,’ Judge Block continued, ‘anything you may have read in the papers about two of the house party either admitting or being convicted of being in possession of certain drugs … Finally, I would ask you to disregard the evidence as to the lady who was alleged by the police to have been in some condition of undress, and not let that prejudice your minds in any way.’

  With this amazing directive added as an afterthought to the hours of unforgettably lurid detail concerning ‘the young lady’ which Judge Block had not thought proper to curtail, the jury rose and filed from the courtroom. They were absent just a little more than one hour. At 3:45 p.m., the foreman rose and announced they had reached a unanimous verdict of guilty.

  Amid gasps and cries of ‘No!’ from the girls in the gallery, Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser were put up into the dock and ranged next to Keith for sentencing.

  ‘Keith Richards,’ Judge Block began. ‘The offence for which you have, very properly, been convicted carries a maximum sentence, imposed by Parliament, of up to ten years.’ When the cries of horror from the gallery had abated, he continued:

  ‘That is a view of the seriousness of the offence … As it is, you will go to prison for one year. You will also pay £500 towards the costs of the prosecution.’

  He turned to Robert Fraser.

  ‘Robert Hugh Fraser – you have pleaded guilty to possessing a highly dangerous and harmful drug … You will go to prison for six months. You will also pay £200 towards the costs of the prosecution.’

  Lastly, he turned to Mick Jagger.

  ‘Michael Philip Jagger – you have been found guilty of possessing a potentially dangerous and harmful drug … You will go to prison for three months. You will pay £200 towards the costs of the prosecution.’

  Jagger, as the words hit him, crumpled up and clutched his forehead with his hand. Keith remained, white-faced and stiff-backed, staring in front of him. Robert Fraser blew out his cheeks as if in a blast of icy air. As they left the dock together, amid an uproar of shouts and weeping from the gallery, Jagger dissolved into tears.

  News of Judge Block’s justice had already reached the crowd outside the court building. As the three were led downstairs, they could already hear chants of ‘Shame!’ and ‘Let them go!’

  At the court building’s front entrance, a crowd of 600 surged against the big metal gates, struggling for the best view of the two Stones when they were brought out to their prison van. A shout went up as Keith Richard’s blue Bentley appeared, carrying Tom Keylock and Marianne Faithfull. Marianne, too, was crying as Keylock ushered her inside for a fifteen-minute meeting with Jagger before he left to begin his sentence.

  Half an hour later, while a decoy van fought to get through the spectators outside the rear gate, Jagger, Richard and Fraser were hurried through the front vestibule and into a police squad car. Just outside Chichester, they were transferred to a police van with a seven-man crew. The van then headed for London – or seemed to as far as its passengers could tell. They were, they realized, in the grip of arrangements more inflexibly certain than the best-organized tour schedule.

  The first stop was Brixton Prison where, it had been decided, Mick Jagger would serve his sentence well separated from his colleagues in crime. Keith Richard and Robert Fraser, handcuffed together, deduced they were bound for a common destination. Forty minutes later, the van stopped again, at the end of a long, dreary cul-de-sac, before the Gothic main gate of Wormwood Scrubs.

  The events of the next twenty-four hours raise the interesting possibility that authority’s main purpos
e in bagging the two Stones was to inflict ritual bathing, delousing and barbering, and then leave them to the mercy of prisoners who would know even better than Judge Leslie Block the proper treatment for prissy and perverted pop stars.

  If that was the idea, it failed most miserably. Though Jagger and Richard both underwent full induction as prisoners, exchanging their Carnaby clothes for regulation blue denim overalls and black shoes, no attempt was made to cut their hair or otherwise abuse them. Jagger, at Brixton, was taken to a single cell which – he afterwards said – ‘wasn’t so much worse than a hotel room in Minnesota’. At ‘The Scrubs’, as Keith – now prisoner number 7855 – was escorted to his cell, other prisoners shouted out ‘Hard luck mate,’ threw him cigarettes – and asked him if he wanted any hash.

  Directly after the sentences were pronounced, Michael Havers had asked for, and been granted, a certificate of leave for Jagger and Richard to appeal against both their convictions and sentences. The matter was set down for preliminary hearing in the Court of Appeal on the very next day, June 30. Since the full appeal, involving transcripts of the Chichester trial, could not be made ready before the current legal term ended, it was obvious that Jagger and Richard must languish in prison for the next two months or be granted bail. Before going into court next afternoon, Michael Havers was seen by the prosecution counsel, Malcolm Morris, and told that Morris had ‘direct instructions’ not to oppose his application for bail.

  The intervening night had seen demonstrations of protest by Rolling Stones fans that, for once, seemed devoted to a purpose other than simple mayhem. In Piccadilly Circus, 300 teenagers in kaftans and bells held an all-night vigil around the Eros statue. Others, more pertinently, collected in Bouverie Street to shout insults at the News of the World. In clubs and discotheques up and down Britain, disc jockeys called for symbolic moments of silence, or played non-stop Stones records. In New York, when the news came through, groups of American hippies mounted angry pickets outside the British Consulate. It was reported that other British pop groups had volunteered to play in a gigantic ‘free-the-Stones’ concert whose proceeds would be spent on an avalanche of flowers with which to engulf Judge Block. The most spontaneously generous demonstration of professional solidarity came from The Who – a cover version of It’s All Over Now and Under My Thumb, recorded in a morning and put out over pirate radio that same afternoon, with a large press announcement that, until Jagger and Richard were released, The Who would do everything possible to keep their work before the public.

  Nor was the protest confined to the sphere of pop only. Letters to The Times – from playwright John Osborne among others – deplored the harshness of the sentences and the many inconsistencies, to put it no worse, which had marked the trial. A newspaper interview with Christopher Gibbs did something to counteract the rampaging rumour about sex orgies with Mars bars. It carried much weight that this hitherto undisclosed Redlands guest, who swore Keith’s party had been ‘thoroughly decorous’, was an old Etonian and a nephew of the Governor of Rhodesia.

  On June 30, Michael Havers QC rose to his feet in the Court of Appeal to request the bail for Mick Jagger and Keith Richard that some inscrutable mechanism within the British establishment had already decided should be given. During the twenty-five-minute hearing, Havers barely needed to develop his argument that Mick Jagger was no drug addict or pusher, that he had verbal permission from a doctor to possess amphetamines, and that insufficient and unfair evidence had been used to convict Keith Richard of allowing his house to be used for cannabis-smoking. Lord Justice Diplock, speaking for his two fellow appeal judges, granted each bail of £5,000, with further sureties totalling £2,000 each, until their full appeal hearing when the new law term opened in September. The court, however, refused Havers’s request that Jagger and Richard should be allowed to leave Britain in the meantime, and ordered them to surrender their passports.

  Robert Fraser’s counsel, William Denny, asked for Fraser to receive bail pending his appeal against sentence. Mr Denny argued that Fraser was no longer a heroin addict and, in addiction, felt ‘a sense of grievance’ that his case had been tried under the same unnatural spotlight as the two Stones’. His application for bail was refused, but with a proviso that his appeal should be squeezed in before the end of the current law term.

  By 4:30 p.m., Mick Jagger was free. He sat alone in the back of Keith’s Bentley, smiling wanly at a group of schoolgirls who, somehow, had collected outside Brixton Prison to see Tom Keylock drive him away. At 5:10, the Bentley arrived at Wormwood Scrubs to pick up Keith. Keylock then drove straight to a Fleet Street pub, the Feathers, where Les Perrin had convened a rush press conference. Both Stones looked weary, crumpled, but impressively composed. Jagger told reporters he had spent some of his time in Brixton ‘writing poetry’. Asked how he had been treated, he said, ‘Everyone was very kind and helpful.’ Keith – who had, at one point, launched into furious kicking of his cell door – confined himself to denying the Stones had ever contemplated a break-up. Jagger drank a vodka and lime, and Keith a whisky and ginger ale, for which the pub landlord refused to accept any payment.

  Next morning, Jagger sat in bed once more beside Marianne, with every national newspaper spread round him on the coverlet. Fleet Street had performed a complete volte-face, greeting his liberation with almost audible church bells and cannon fire. Even the Beatles had never drawn so comprehensive a crop of banner headlines and editorial comment. Among the latter was an item whose unlikely source – and still more unlikely author – added all the more weight to words that, with hindsight, fix the precise moment when everyone stopped going barmy.

  William Rees-Mogg, until that day, had seemed to have little in common with his great predecessors as editor of The Times. He was a man of schoolmasterly mien, slightly bookish and dusty, whose avowed passions were for the classics and Somerset, and who generally stayed remote from mundane editorial matters, like hard news.

  William Rees-Mogg was at the furthest possible extreme from Mick Jagger, the Rolling Stones, pop music or teenagers. His instincts, none the less, proved to be those of a courageous as well as deeply moral-minded journalist. On Saturday, July 1, The Times’s first leader was given over entirely to the Jagger case. Rees-Mogg had written it himself, headlining it – as perhaps only Rees-Mogg would – with a quotation from Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot: WHO BREAKS A BUTTERFLY ON A WHEEL.

  ‘… Judge Block directed the jury that the approval of a doctor was not a defence in law to the charge of possessing drugs without a prescription, and the jury convicted. Mr Jagger was not charged with complicity in any other drug offence that occurred in the same house. They were separate cases, and no evidence was produced to suggest that he knew that Mr Fraser had heroin tablets or that the vanishing Mr Sneidermann [sic] had cannabis resin. It is indeed no offence to be in the same building or the same company as people possessing or even using drugs, nor could it reasonably be made an offence …

  ‘One has to ask, therefore, how it is that this technical offence, divorced as it must be from other people’s offences, was thought to deserve the penalty of imprisonment. In the courts at large it is most uncommon for imprisonment to be imposed on first offenders where the drugs are not major drugs of addiction and there is no question of drug traffic. The normal penalty is probation, and the purpose of probation is to encourage the offender to develop his career and to avoid the drug risks in future. It is surprising, therefore, that Judge Block should have decided to sentence Mr Jagger to imprisonment, and particularly surprising as Mr Jagger’s is about as mild a drug case as can ever have been brought before the Courts.

  ‘It would be wrong to speculate on the judge’s reasons, which we do not know. It is, however, possible to consider the public reaction. There are many people who take a primitive view of the matter. They consider that Mr Jagger has “got what was coming to him”. They resent the anarchic quality of the Rolling Stones’ performances, dislike their songs, dislike their influ
ence on teenagers and broadly suspect them of decadence.

  ‘As a sociological concern this may be reasonable enough, and at an emotional level it is very understandable, but it has nothing at all to do with the case. One has to ask a different question: has Mr Jagger received the same treatment as he would have received if he had not been a famous figure, with all the criticism and resentment his celebrity has aroused. If a promising undergraduate had come back from a summer visit to Italy with four pep pills in his pocket, would it have been thought right to ruin his career by sending him to prison for three months? Would it also have been thought necessary to display him handcuffed to the public?

  ‘There are cases in which a single figure becomes the focus for public concern about some aspects of public morality. The Stephen Ward case, with its dubious evidence and questionable verdict, was one of them, and that verdict killed Stephen Ward. There are elements of the same emotions in the reactions to this case. If we are going to make any case a symbol of the conflict between the sound traditional values of Britain and the new hedonism, then we must be sure that the sound traditional values include those of tolerance and equity. It should be the particular quality of British justice to ensure that Mr Jagger is treated exactly the same as anyone else, no better and no worse. There must remain a suspicion in this case that Mr Jagger received a more severe sentence than would have been thought proper for any purely anonymous young man.’

  In commenting on a case which still had to go to appeal, William Rees-Mogg was technically in contempt of court and, as such, liable to both a heavy fine and imprisonment. That no attempt was made to prosecute, or even admonish, him testifies, not only to the manifest humanity and moral soundness of his editorial but also the new official line that Jagger was now to be let off the hook. The Sunday Times, next day, made the same points, and ran the same risk, in a quietly outraged piece by Hugo Young, mentioning the ironic fact that new drug legislation even now before Parliament would transfer the prescribing of hard drugs from private doctors to community treatment centres. Jagger, wrote Hugo Young, had been convicted ‘to appease the lust for social revenge’.